What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Lead Scoring With Video

Editors note: This blog post originally appeared as contributed content on the Heinz Marketing blog.

While most marketers are familiar with lead scoring, adoption of this powerful sales and marketing technique is still slow. Lattice Engines reports in a recent survey that only 44% of companies are using lead scoring in their day-to-day marketing efforts.

While less than half of marketers have one implemented, a lead scoring model is an undoubtedly powerful way to segment incoming leads and ensure that your sales team is prioritizing the most qualified opportunities. The insight you gain has powerful implications; as Stu Shmidt, Vice President of Solution Sales at Cisco Webex said at the Sales 2.0 Conference:

“A 10% improvement in lead quality can result in a 40% improvement in sales productivity.”

How to Get Started

The first step in building out a comprehensive lead-scoring model is determining when a lead should be passed to sales. Marketing and sales coming to a joint agreement on the definitions of leads and opportunities based on score thresholds is critical. The lead scores are calculated by your marketing automation system. Here’s an example of lead score thresholds:

Lead Score

Priority

Action

0-40

Interested

Nurturing/Drip Emails

41-60

Lead

Telemarketing/Email Campaigns

61+

Sales Qualified Lead

Direct Sales Outreach

How this score is built depends entirely on what your marketing and sales teams feel drives engagement. Having sales and marketing work together on these goals is important, as this sets the bar for when a lead is passed from marketing to sales.

Here’s an example of what lead scores could look like for some individuals based on their behavior and engagement with common marketing & sales activities:

Behavior

Visitor 1

Visitor 2

Visited Landing Page (+3 Points)

3

3

Watched Explainer Video (+8 Points)

8

0

Viewed Case Studies (+5 Points Each)

10

20

Viewed Pricing Page (+5 Points)

5

5

Opened Drip Email (+3 Points Each)

3

6

Attended Webinar (+10 Points)

10

10

Total Score

39

44

In this example, Visitor 1 would fall under the Interested category, and would be funneled into a nurturing campaign of drip emails and marketing outreach, while Visitor 2 is qualified as a lead, and would be moved over to a telemarketing outreach, or a targeted email campaign.

While neither of these leads is interested enough to be sent directly to the sales team, additional interactions will contribute to their lead score and move them towards a higher level of qualification.

Adding Video Engagement Data to the mix

One of the most powerful experiences your website visitors can have without meeting your team is through watching a video. Videos build trust and understanding faster than any other resource you can offer your prospects.

Whether you offer a product demo video, a series of targeted webinars, or customer testimonials, visitors that commit to watching your videos are giving your content their undivided attention. This is why your video assets should play a key role in your lead-scoring mechanisms.

The data you collect with a video marketing platform like Vidyard can be pumped directly into your marketing automation system. This information can then be used to score, segment, and nurture your leads. By tracking in-depth analytics on viewer behavior, you can discover nuances of prospect behavior and ensure that highly engaged leads consuming your content are put at the top of your priority list.

￼Here’s a simple set of scoring rules for a small set of video content:

Video Content

Started Video

Viewed <50%

Completed Video

Intro Video

+1

+2

+5

Testimonials

+1

+3

+8

Product Explainer Video

+1

+6

+15

Webinar

+1

+6

+15

With this model, a lead score increases when a visitor clicks a play button, but watching more than 50% of a video has a bigger impact. Moreover, completing the video has a high impact on lead score as attention span is directly linked to prospects’ interest. Completing content that is more involved, such as a webinar or product demo, also contributes to a higher lead score.

With the above lead scoring example, we have no time frame on engagement for this visitor – they may have consumed all this video content over a matter of months. But what happens when a prospect consumes a large quantity of video content over a matter of hours?

Using Video Volume to Your Advantage

Many companies are adopting video testimonials and using video in their support and product education efforts, but marketing metrics traditionally only look at individual video results – not a lead’s viewing behavior across all video assets.

With this in mind, you should adapt your lead scoring rules to look at how much video a lead has taken in during a time period, giving your sales team the power to follow up with leads when they are most engaged

Here’s an example of volume-based lead scoring rules:

Prospect Has Viewed

In The Last 24 Hours

In The Last 7 Days

In The Last 14 Days

30 Minutes of Video

+10

+5

+2

2 Hours of Video

+14

+7

+3

6 Webinars

+20

+10

+4

If a prospect has viewed six webinars in the last 24 hours, most sales people would jump at the opportunity to talk to such an engaged lead. By building your lead scoring rules around your video assets, you give your sales team the opportunity to follow up with prospects when they are most engaged. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that sales teams who tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving an explicit inquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead, yet only 37% of companies did so.

The Bottom Line

Video content is an investment, so ensuring that this content is properly integrated into your lead scoring mechanism is the key to getting the most out of your video assets.

By leveraging the power of your video assets to enhance your lead scoring model, you help drive quality leads to your sales team, and enhance the ROI of your video content by integrating it fully into your marketing and sales funnel.

How are you incorporating video assets into your content marketing and lead scoring? Let us know with a comment!

Jon Spenceley

Jon is the Content and Social Media Manager here at Vidyard, and is passionate about helping companies get the most out of their video. In his spare time, Jon's an amateur longboarder, distiller-in-training, and is a sucker for breakfast foods.

MikeLeeNews

Intregation, as Jon points out, is very important. I would also urge marketers to add SERIAL Storytelling video to their arsenal. It brings some powerful and proven success tools. http://mikeleenews.com/